Yamato
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Asking To Use Phones In The Hood Social Experiment GONE WRONG
Most Epic In The Hood Prank Gone Wrong Reactions Of All Time
Man Slaps The Soul Out Of Girl On The NY Subway - The Slap Heard Around The Subway
Two days ago I was browsing on youtube and came across these two interesting videos that I posted above, that show how violent people are in New York.
Then today I went to work, had to put up with the usual abuses by the orangutan colleague, who yawns out loud, sings, whistles, talks very loudly, and bothers me all day long. But he's over 50 and I cannot educate him unfortunately. I should thank his mom for doing such a poor job.
Anyway, then I came home, and today, since my cab driver was on holiday, I took the tram. And sure enough I think I saw a person who was filming me, but I am not sure. Well, I didn't say anything and didn't even look at him, but if he was, it was an extremely rude thing to do. Especially considering that I was dressed normally, and wasn't doing anything unusual.
Well, these are the people, I guess. Not like the people in New York, but almost. For some reason, things here are not as bad, on public transportation. On the other hand, at the office they are worse, because i think the orangutan would not be allowed to be a bank employee in the US.
When I think of these situations, with these people, the pejorative term that comes to my mind is "plebs", which we use in Italian ("la plebe") to define people whom we despise. In my case this happens to be a large majority of people, among which the orangutan and many other colleagues. But it has nothing to do with how rich you are or what school you went to. It has to do with being intelligent, fair, honest and polite. All things that can be changed. I would not discriminate on things someone cannot change, such as race, religion, height, intelligence... well, I just contradicted myself... but yeah, intelligence in my opinion can be changed. If you decide to think, and pay attention, instead of watching soccer, in the long run it is going to make you intelligent. A person who tries is intelligent to me. A person who instead of working at my office, spends the day talking about soccer, as the orangutan and the others do, then not only is he stupid, but also dishonest.
Then I have another consideration, slightly related.
What is the difference between an astronaut and a prehistoric man who does the horrible things they did back then, that is to say even just 20,000 years ago?
What is the difference?
Anatomically modern humans have been around for 200,000 years, so if one of us had been born 200,000 years ago, our environment would have turned him into of those guys. I don't mean just the level of civilization that makes you go to watch the gladiators and enjoy the show, but much worse.
That is to say that yeah, I owe what I am not to myself but to my environment. That is why I did not turn out like the orangutan. But i knew already, and it doesn't keep me from trying to avoid savages as much as possible.
But what I really wanted to draw the attention on, is the fact that it is scary to think that if you abandoned a few children on an island, they would be exactly like the men of 200,000 years ago, no more no less.
What makes us what we are is the level of civilization that is passed on from one generation to the other. In fact it is passed to some of us to a lesser degree. I am not an astronaut and my orangutan colleague is not me.
Another interesting thing is that each time a new person is born, the gap he has to catch is wider. If you were born 200,000 years ago, you had almost nothing to catch up with, maybe just the spoken language. Then 2,000 years ago, someone had to start from zero again, but he also should/could have learned how to read and write. Now someone has so much to catch up with that he can't possibly do it.
Recapitulating:
1) scary thought that all that separates us from savages is the knowledge passed on from one generation to the next
1) scary thought that this knowledge to acquire is increasing, and the gap for a newborn to catch up is getting wider
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